There is an increasing use of digital photography based upon the decrease in size and cost of digital cameras as well as concurrent increases in availability, usability, and resolution capabilities. Manufacturers and the like have continuously strived to provide smaller electronics in order to satisfy consumer demand, associated with carrying, storing, and using electronic devices. Thus, digital photography has demonstrated growth and has proven to be a profitable market for both electronics and software.
A user first experiences the overwhelming benefits of digital photography upon capturing a digital image. While conventional print photography forces the photographer to wait until development of expensive film to view a print, a digital image in digital photography can be viewed within seconds by utilizing a thumbnail image and/or viewing port on a digital camera. Additionally, images can be deleted or saved based upon user preference, thereby allowing economical use of limited image storage space. In general, digital photography provides a more efficient experience in photography.
Furthermore, editing techniques available for a digital image are vast and numerous with limitations being only the editor's imagination. For example, a digital image can be edited using techniques such as crop, resize, blur, sharpen, contrast, brightness, gamma, transparency, rotate, emboss, texture, draw tools (e.g., fill or pen, add circles, boxes), insert text, etc. In contrast, conventional print photography merely enables the developer to control developing variables such as exposure time, light strength, type of light-sensitive paper, and various light filters. Moreover, such conventional print photography techniques are expensive whereas digital photography software is becoming more common on computers.
In addition to advantages relating to digital photography with respect to image capturing and developing, digital photography facilitates sharing of the taken images. Once captured, images being shared with another can accompany a story (e.g., a verbal narration) and/or physical presentation of such images. Regarding conventional print photographs, sharing options are limited to picture albums, which entail a variety of complications involving organization, storage, and accessibility. Moreover, physical presence of the album is necessary to share print photographs with another.
In view of the above benefits associated with digital photography and traditional deficiencies of print photography, digital images and digital albums correcting such deficiencies have increasingly replaced conventional print photographs and albums. In particular, image-based video provides a convenient and efficient technique for sharing digital images. Image-based video is a slide show of images with motion (e.g., panning, zooming, cross-fading, . . . ) applied to still images. An effect of utilizing image-based video is an enhanced motion video experience that enables details of high-resolution images to be better viewed on a TV screen and/or computer monitor. For example, resolution of a picture taken by a typical 3 MegaPixel digital still camera is about 2000×1500 pixels whereas resolution of a typical computer monitor is 1024×768 pixels. However, with the growing demand of consumers, high-end digital still cameras can provide pictures with much higher resolutions.
Information regarding the image-based video must be saved (e.g., during a creation process and/or at a conclusion) to a file for future playback. In one storage technique, each frame of the video is saved as a picture. However, this technique requires a substantial amount of storage space and CPU (e.g., processor) time in which information relating to the motion can be lost. In yet another more efficient storage technique, a source image and motion vectors associated with an image are encoded (e.g., the source images are encoded to provide better compression). Next, at rendering (e.g., playback) time, each encoded source image and its encoded motion vectors are decoded, allowing the generation of the output video frames.
When creating image-based video, substantial motions (e.g., panning, zooming, cross-fading, etc.) can create various problems in areas such as presentation, resolution, resolution, memory and/or processor capabilities. In any computing environment, hardware and associated components are limited; therefore efficient use is crucial to overall user experience. Substantial panning and/or zooming require a substantial portion of a source image to be encoded in video to enable display of source image content with high fidelity. For example, the size of a high-resolution source image can be m×n in pixels and a motion can be a zoom that alters a view of the source image from the entire image (m×n) to an m/8×n/8 area of such source image. Thereafter, a resulting video can be produced in p×q pixels resolution where m>p>m/8 and n>q>n/8. When fully zoomed, the picture portion of the size m/8×n/8 pixels is displayed, ideally, in the highest fidelity. In order to maintain fidelity, the entire image m×n pixels must be stored.
Based on the previous example, several problems arise during image-based video. Encoding of such a high-resolution source image requires decoding of the source image, which is time consuming to both a user and processor. Once decoded, an uncompressed image requires a substantial amount of memory to adequately store such image. In addition, each frame generated from the source image needs resizing-increasing the processor usage during resizing and rendering. The larger the source image, the higher is the CPU usage during resizing. Furthermore, a typical video system displays at a rate of 30 frames per second, allowing approximately 33 milliseconds for decoding a source image, resizing and rendering each frame to be displayed. If a system does not generate and render a frame within the allotted 33 milliseconds, motion of the video becomes choppy and viewing pleasure is deteriorated. Although processor speeds continue to increase, typical consumer processors and computing environments easily consume over 33 milliseconds when the source image is of high resolution.
In view of the above, there is a need to improve upon and/or provide systems and/or methods relating to image-based video that facilitates encoding a source image associated with a motion vector.